Sounds From Underground
by s-s-s-snakebite
Summary: And if El Capitán is determined to dismiss every last childish fancy that crosses his path, let it be known that he does so with very good reason.


The mirror shows him an empty room and the shape of his own shadow, cast back on its heels against the wall where the oily lamplight is busily attempting to corner it. Though he does not believe that any of his own men would approach him from that quarter, Vidal keeps watch over those empty spaces, that flat looking-glass staring back at him like a great, blind eye. There are people in this compound that he does not possess as wholly as others. Soldiers and cooks and cleaning maids who keep their gazes respectfully downcast; but when he does catch a glimpse of them catching a glimpse of him, he sees their eyes like mirrors showing him an empty room, and he thinks:

Mirror-people, inhabiting far-away places while their flesh makes its way numbly through the tangible world. Unfocused, unambitious. They are not to be trusted.

* * *

Mercedes has a cat's mouth. She is clever enough to capture her words one by one like little prey things; but if they are mild she lets them go free. Even when her eyes flash as violently as a distant storm stirring along the flanks of the sky, she bites down on the thunder, swallows it whole. Not a single thread of ill temper has tangled her voice for months. She would be pretty with her lips painted and her lashes dusted dark as meadowlark wings, but cosmetics are as tightly rationed as anything, and those that Vidal can offer freely must go to Carmen.

Children's books have been set on a corner of the kitchen table, and when he makes a comment about them, Mercedes sweeps them up in her long arms and shuffles them out of sight, saying: "I'll remove them immediately, Señor."

He takes his seat, palming the armrests where the sun has warmed them. "I do not tolerate disruptions. You know that. I have no time to waste; and now I have no appetite."

"Please, Señor. We wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if you didn't take your breakfast as usual."

He would never admit it, but he is grateful for her, for Mercedes. Without her, he doubts that anything in the household would ever be finished. The meals would go unprepared, the daily chores would never be assigned or addressed, the buildings and vegetable gardens would fall into terrible disrepair as though the whole countryside was inhabited only by rebels and ghosts. Very little power rests in her hands, and yet she is the part of the string that holds the knot together. It is not fondness that he feels for her so much as it is the sort of calm reliance that the wolf must feel for his thick winter coat.

He eats what she sets before him while fingers of sunlight creep across the table thoughtfully. A stack of old newspapers and typed reports wait at his elbow, and he spends some time going through them, only to find that there is a slender book among them that he does not recognize. He knows what time it is simply by the movement of the sun, but he checks his father's watch regardless. Deciding that he has time to read a little longer, he flips the cover open, scans the pages.

When Mercedes comes to collect the dishes, he puts the little volume of fairy tales down in front of her. She looks at it for a moment in silence with her hair lit like a halo and her shoulders set sharp as a falcon's brow.

"I'm sorry, Señor," she says. "I hadn't realized there was another."

"It's fine," he tells her, and watches as she folds it into a pocket of her apron.

She keeps her head down, but he still has the impression that she is angry. Her hands dart swift and sharp; her cat's mouth pinches shut around some insubordinate thought. He feels the urge to smile at her displeasure, and chooses not to indulge it. Instead he stands up and puts his cap on neatly, pausing in the doorway until Mercedes looks up again, meets his eye squarely and with the fierce focus of a mountain lion.

"Be sure that the little girl is not permitted in the kitchen, pantry or dining room outside of meal times," he says.

Her face in shadow, Mercedes takes a long time to nod an assent. But, eventually and inevitably, she does.

Vidal does smile at her then, faintly, and steps out to meet the fresh scent of the forest and the industrious sounds of the morning she has made for him.

* * *

An empty cradle; a child who runs away to live in the woods like an animal, or stands in the corner and speaks to nothing. He cannot abide such things; but there are other, more immediate worries to distract him indefinitely.

For one thing, Carmen is unwell again, wearing her weakness like beloved shawl, as if she has always been ill and always will be. At her gentle insistence, Vidal is persuaded to believe that this is normal - or, at least, acceptable so long as the Doctor is close and alert to her condition. Vidal occasionally visits her himself in the smoky darkness of her room and talks about the progress he has made in the training of a young, beautiful colt given to him by the General. He does not know if she has any interest in riding, and it seems to him that her body and her bones would shake apart on the shoulders of the powerful mares boarded at the stables in wartime.

"What will it be like here in the winter?" she asks abruptly, and he expects himself to be irritated with her; she sounds as though she was not listening at all.

An unusual tranquility overtakes him, however, when he thinks about the drifting snow and glittering, operatic winds. He and his forces will be coiled up indoors, like a hunting dog sleeping by the hearth, while the world fights his battles for him.

Knowing that she might become anxious at a comment of this nature, he only says: "It's quite beautiful here after the first storms have passed."

She smiles. "Ofelia will have a wonderful time, I think. In the city, there was only ever frozen mud and dirty banks of snow alongside the road. Here, she'll have the chance to see a real winter."

"It will be very cold," Vidal says flatly. "And dangerous for her."

"We will look after her, and she will teach her little brother to talk a little before spring comes again."

Wandering off into the black spaces between trees, calling to things that have no name or loyalty.

"You should rest," he replies.

* * *

All of her stories and fantasies are familiar to him. _Know your enemy_, he might have said to explain himself, but the truth of it is that he was a child like any other once, and his mother read the old tales to him while he was still too young to know any better than that. Ancient meadows and starless nights were in his dreams when he was a boy. He knows all about princesses and knights with helmets shaped like a dragon's sneering face; he simply stopped believing in them, long ago, when he saw the look of contempt on his father's face as he said, _bedtime stories and lies fit for little girls._

And so they were.

For Carmen's sake, he pretends not to overhear Ofelia when she trails the maids and tells them stories about river gods and prophecies and monstrous voices that bubble up from beneath the wooden floors, but ignorance - even when it is feigned - does not sit well with him. His senses are his weapons; he is aware, and uses his awareness to make a kingdom of his surroundings, no matter how spare or lavish they may be. Turning his head away when a girl speaks of creatures with horns that curled back like the devil's makes his blood stir with dark disquiet. He feels, abstractly, as though he has become her accomplice, and learns to mistrust her smiles. They are always turned toward empty spaces and pale shadows, as though she has been wandering on the other side of the mirror all along.

* * *

And as Ofelia's eyes grow more distant and blind; and as Carmen slips deeper into her velvet-lined illness; and as the mirror shows him a room filled with the flickering shapes and suggestions of treachery, he remembers one thing that the fairy tales did impart to him with some wisdom:

Demons often take the most unlikely forms.


End file.
